Reading the Bible
The Bible pane is the centre of {}, and everything else in the window is arranged around it. This page covers moving through Scripture, switching translations, the three display modes, and reading several passages at once.
Study Tools
Everything on this page works the same way: select a verse in the Bible pane, and the study tools follow it. Commentaries, dictionaries, cross-references, and topics all react to your current selection, so you rarely have to search for anything by hand.
Searching
{} searches the full text of every module you have installed. There is a quick search for everyday use, an advanced dialog for precise queries, and a semantic search for when you remember the sense of a verse but not its wording.
Notes & Highlights
{} separates what you read from what you write. Modules are read-only content; everything you create lives in your own database, backed up and restored independently. This page covers all of it: highlights, verse notes, documents, the journal, and prayer lists.
Bookmarks & Collections
Bookmarks save verses you want to come back to. Collections organize those bookmarks into folders. Together they're how a body of verses accumulates over time without turning into a list you can't navigate.
Copying & Exporting
Getting text out of {} — into a sermon, an essay, a message to a friend — is deliberately flexible, because everyone's citation conventions are different.
Sessions & Layout
The window is yours to arrange. Panes can be split, dragged, resized, and pulled out into separate windows — and whatever you end up with is remembered.
Personalizing
You'll spend hours reading in this app, so it's worth a few minutes making the text comfortable. Open File → Preferences… (Ctrl+,) — on macOS, Bible → Preferences….
Backup & Restore
Your modules can be downloaded again. Your notes cannot. Years of annotation, your own cross-references, the collections you've built — that is the part of {} that is genuinely irreplaceable, and it lives on one computer.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The same list is available inside the app at Help → Keyboard Shortcuts, or by pressing Ctrl+/.